Tokyo Squandering Financial Resources on “2020 Olympic English Drive”

Although Masuzoe is no longer the Tokyo governor, it seems his era of fleecing Tokyo taxpayers was spread passed his own illegal personal use of government funds:

And all this studying was happening between 9:10 and 11:40 a.m. — during work time, when they should have been toiling on behalf of Tokyo’s millions of taxpayers. Instead, the city was forking out tens of millions of yen from public funds to teach them a subject they had already studied for at least six years at school, and probably a couple more at university.

I contacted the metropolitan government for comment about the amount of public money involved in this project but neither the Bureau of General Affairs nor the Office of the Governor for Policy Planning had responded by the time of going to print. ECC’s salesperson in charge of the Tokyo government account also declined to comment.

The significance of all this did not hit me at first, but what did raise eyebrows in the makeshift teachers’ room was the number of students attending — around 200 each month — and the fact that few had any direct relationship with the various Olympic-related positions in the city government. The scheme effectively meant the loss of around 1,000 work-hours a month by attending students. Questions I sent to the Tokyo government about how staff were selected for the English course have also gone unanswered.

SCOTT (すこっと)

Scott (すこっと) is a cyber security, threat intelligence strategist, and technology evangelist working and living in Tokyo. In addition to his day job, Scott is fascinated by the future of computing, the technology industry, privacy, encryption, mobile apps, politics, & Japan. Scott enjoys taking pictures with his iPhone and sharing them freely online, primarily on Instagram.